Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) and 2Excel Aviation have successfully completed a demonstration of IAI’s Maritime Heron UAS in a series of live, Beyond Visual Line of Sight maritime search and ISR scenarios. The demonstration was based out of West Wales Airport in Aberporth, Wales. Attending the demonstration were in-person and virtual observers from the UK Ministry of Defence, Government and the Civil sector.
The Heron UAS was ready to fly within 36 hours of arriving at West Wales and maintained full serviceability throughout the period of the deployment. The Heron UAS achieved 100% of its planned scenarios, despite the challenging seasonal weather conditions. The system demonstrated that it is highly capable in missions including search and rescue, border protection, fisheries patrol, safety at sea, small boat detection and surveillance and other activities.
In-person attendees were able to make requests of the system, which were relayed live to the Ground Control Station (GCS) during the presentation. Rule-based scenarios were also demonstrated via IAI’s Starlight data exploitation tool, which received inputs from the Heron UAS’ multi-mission radar, EO/IR sensor and AIS. Points of interest were then generated using Starlight’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data processing engine to produce Actionable Intelligence, Insights and Maritime Awareness. Data gathered was simultaneously broadcast to in-person and virtual attendees using IAI’s data dissemination tool (Commander’s Remote Imagery Situation Picture – CRISP).
